iCloud transition off to a rocky start for MobileMe, family users

The move from MobileMe to iCloud has been rocky for many MobileMe users. Apple …

Apple's transition from MobileMe to iCloud brings the promise of centralized, cloud-based storage for all your important data. Unfortunately, the transition hasn't been smooth for all users. Aside from Apple's servers being overloaded with MobileMe account transitions, some are having issues reconciling Apple's assumption that every user has a unique Apple ID and that every Apple ID is used for just one person.

People who never used MobileMe and only ever used one Apple ID for iTunes purchases appear to be experiencing a completely smooth transition to iCloud. We haven't heard of any serious complaints from users in this scenario. It's the users with more than one Apple ID, users who have shared an Apple ID with family members, and users transitioning from MobileMe, however, who have reported a variety of problems making the jump to the cloud.

Though rumors popped up in the weeks running up to the iCloud launch that Apple was working on a way to merge multiple Apple IDs, such a process still is not publicly available. People who have used more than one Apple ID in the past may have a variety of iTunes song, video, app, and other purchases associated with more than one of them. While a Mac or PC can be authorized with more than one Apple ID at a time, only one can be associated with an iOS device in any 90 day period. Being able to sync past purchases from more than one account just isn't possible.

Other users are having the opposite problem. Some families have used a single Apple ID for iTunes purchases for mom, dad, brother, and sister (or various other combinations). While such a strategy may have made sense for a particular family's needs—especially if younger children were using iPod touches with parental approval—if that ID is used for iCloud, it could create headaches. Unless all devices are going to be synced to the same data store—with everyone sharing contacts, calendars, and other information—other users who were previously dependent on that account may have to re-purchase apps or music.

Thankfully, there's a partial solution to this. Apple allows for a separate Apple ID for the iTunes Store and iCloud; if everyone in a family creates and uses a unique Apple ID for iCloud, they could still share an Apple ID for iTunes. Even if the shared account has been used to set up iCloud for one family member, the rest could still use that Apple ID for iTunes only. Users will just have to be very careful that everything is set up properly; since everyone in the family will know the password, if another member inadvertently uses that Apple ID for iCloud during setup it could cause data syncing problems.

But wait, there's more

Still, users transitioning from MobileMe may experience one or more of several other reported issues. Apple's servers were inundated with MobileMe to iCloud transfer requests after iCloud became available last Wednesday. Apple had to throttle account transitions in order to keep up, and some users reported as late as Saturday that they had not yet been able to move an account over.

Even those who were able to successfully move a MobileMe account to iCloud found that e-mail servers would no longer recognize valid passwords. Apple did acknowledge the password issue on Friday, and as of late Sunday, Apple updated its iCloud system status to say that mail accounts and account transfers are now working as expected. If you still have a problem with mail servers recognizing your password, however, deleting the account from Mail and re-adding it is a known workaround.

People who originally used .Mac or were early adopters of MobileMe are likely to have both @mac.com and @me.com Apple IDs. As far as Apple is concerned, these Apple IDs are interchangeable, but we've heard a handful of reports of display anomalies for some users. Logging in using me.com might show the Apple ID as mac.com on one or more devices, or vice versa. After consulting with MobileMe support staff, we are confident that the issue does not affect functionality, whatever the bug may be that causes the Apple ID to display differently on different devices.

Some users, however, may experience an error saying that a me.com or mac.com e-mail address cannot be verified and used with iMessage or FaceTime. The known cause for this problem is that a user's MobileMe account may have been added as an alternate e-mail address for a separate Apple ID account. (I personally experienced this problem; I had previously added a me.com account to a separate Apple ID to use FaceTime.) The fix for this problem is to remove the MobileMe e-mail address from the other Apple ID by going to appleid.apple.com. Once removed, you may have to wait up to 24 hours before activating iMessage or FaceTime using the account.

Given the numerous problems Apple saw while launching MobileMe, it's unfortunate that iCloud has gone through these transition hiccups. Despite the annoyance, some careful planning and a little patience can solve the problems for many users. It's definitely best to keep in mind that iCloud works best when each user has a unique Apple ID. There is still no fix for those who would like to merge multiple Apple IDs into one, but after talking with support staff, it looks like Apple might still be working on a solution.

63 Reader Comments

I've experienced a few of these issues: it took me a few hours of retrying on and off to be able to transition from MobileMe to iCloud, and after transition I had a few glitches getting all my various devices logged in. I also lost email for most of Friday.

The cynic in me says that Apple are making iCloud free so they can legitimately claim that there can be no expectation of service availability - after all, it's free, right?

As a user that's been paying for .mac and MobileMe for 6 years, I'm not 100% happy about that.

Still, I'll see how it pans out. Since Saturday, things have been stable.

I've had MobileMe for a while with the family plan. I've also been sharing an Apple ID for purchases across devices. Since the purchase id and the MobileMe email addresses were different there were no particular issues. The problem was mainly one of confusion. I wasn't sure if I should be merging id's, etc.

Your documented approach was the one I went with and the best/correct one. Have each person get their own iCloud id (by migrating MobileMe accounts) and use settings to change the store id to the shared id.

The only hitch I had was that the Find My Friends had my id as name@mac.com but had my "sent" address as name@me.com. That gave an error every time I tried to send or accept a friend request. Making the "sent" address match the id address fixed the problem.

We share an account across both phones and the iPad and the biggest issue was actually iMessage as we found that unless we told it otherwise it uses the email address of the apple id before phone number so the messages we sent were going to random places.

I did the same thing as @ctwise, for the most part. Three Apple IDs: wife's, mine, family, where the family account is the iTunes store account. I also made the family account the "main" iCloud ID on our devices so we could share Photostream. If Apple would release that, or make it so you could subscribe to another users Photostream, we'd go to using our individual IDs as the main ID.

The only thing I really see this mattering for is Documents & Data -- but my wife is pretty much a web and emailer -- she doesn't create documents or really even play games, so having that data synced to her phone won't make much of a difference. If she was using her phone like I do, it would be a much bigger deal.

So okay, I updated (painlessly) to 10.7.2 on my MacBook Pro (my productive system iMac is still on Snow Leopard though), and without much expectations I opened the iCloud settings panel (or rather: it opened itself the first time I opened iTunes).

"So what is it good for?"

- Disk space

Agreed, 5 GB is more than what I get with Dropbox. But Dropbox is cross-platform and works well

- Sync of Address Book & Calendar

That's being done via Google

- Sync of Email

Huh? With POP3 that *might* make sense (to have the same folder structure sync'ed over devices), but with IMAP/Google Mail that's definitively not necessary to "sync emails". Or did I miss an "important feature" here?

- Sync of Photos and Music

That's something I especially do NOT want! I want to have control over which photos REMAIN on which device (iPhone, iPod Touch, iMac, MacBook Pro), and I want to sync them explicitly between two devices. Same goes for MP3s where I have dedicated "sync lists" per device (they have different capacities anyway, so I don't see why it would make sense to have "all data everywhere" - for instance I don't even have the same set of applications on my iPhone and iPod Touch!)

So no use to me.

- Find my Mac

Well, nice toy But not a killer feature for me. After all I NEVER lost a device as expensive such as a laptop (I admit I am not a guy travelling a lot with it), and if I did, it is either found and returned to "Lost & Found" and I get it back, or it is really stolen, in which case a message "Please bring back my laptop!" wouldn't help anyway! (And how would the "thief" receive this message anyway, my MacBook Pro is fully encrypted, so they would have to reformat it anyway and then bye bye "Find my Mac"...

- Back to my Mac

Now THAT would be a nice feature! But apparently you have to be a MobileMe member to use this service? Which means 99 bucks a year? For something I get for FREE with TeamViewer (again cross-platform)? No thanks!

Anything else I missed what iCloud can do for me on a *desktop* or *laptop* what I can't already do for cheap with other solutions (Google Mail/Calendar, Dropbox, Teamviewer)?

The Apple ID problem is doing my head in... I've got two of them and I want to ditch one because I don't want to keep the e-mail address but I can't because all my music, apps etc. were purchased with it and there doesn't appear to be any way to transfer everything to my other Apple ID.

I have yet to switch from MM to iCloud and am unlikely to do so for some time. The features I'm going to lose are far better for me then having some music stored on Apple's servers. Although the price of the new service is pretty good

One thing I've not seen anything about is "back to my Mac", now I've not really used it for getting "back to my mac" but it is useful for accessing stuff on my Airport extreme disk from anywhere. Anybody any idea what is happening with that?

One thing I've not seen anything about is "back to my Mac", now I've not really used it for getting "back to my mac" but it is useful for accessing stuff on my Airport extreme disk from anywhere. Anybody any idea what is happening with that?

I can't speak for an Airport Extreme disk, but with a Time Capsule, you simply enter your MobileMe account details in Airport Utility, and the disk is made available with BTMM.

Now THAT would be a nice feature! But apparently you have to be a MobileMe member to use this service? Which means 99 bucks a year? For something I get for FREE with TeamViewer (again cross-platform)? No thanks!

Why would Apple require someone buy a service that they don't sell anymore?

Ahem... it takes me approximatelly half of your time to check a checkbox and enter my Google credentials as to sync all of the above except bookmarks and photos. For the former I use Firefox (again CROSS-platform, but I also could use XMarks which works even CROSS-browser!) and "syncing photos all over my devices" there is no need for me.

flyingember wrote:

with approximately 1 minute of setup time required and no software to download it.

No extra software to download either - and guess what, it's officially supported by Apple (at least the Google sync'ing) and works even on iOS 4.x!

Why would Apple require someone buy a service that they don't sell anymore?

Yeah, that's what I was asking myself as well! But 10.7.2 wanted me to provide "MobileMe" credentials as soon as I wanted to activate the "Back to my Mac" service (in the iCloud settings panel in the system settings).

Ridiculously enough it didn't even hint at how or where to create such an account (every FooBar website nowadays has a "Login or Register" option somewhere!), it just assumes that you KNOW what MobileMe is and where to get it! If I was John CasualUser that would already be the showstopper here...

Or what did I miss? Maybe it's me who has a huge cloud around his head?

Why would Apple require someone buy a service that they don't sell anymore?

Yeah, that's what I was asking myself as well! But 10.7.2 wanted me to provide "MobileMe" credentials as soon as I wanted to activate the "Back to my Mac" service (in the iCloud settings panel in the system settings).

Ridiculously enough it didn't even hint at how or where to create such an account (every FooBar website nowadays has a "Login or Register" option somewhere!), it just assumes that you KNOW what MobileMe is and where to get it! If I was John CasualUser that would already be the showstopper here...

Or what did I miss? Maybe it's me who has a huge cloud around his head?

You missed something. After you transition to iCloud, Back to My Mac should just work with the iCloud account.

Did you try inputting your iCloud credentials in or did you see MobileMe and just shit a brick?

The Apple ID problem is doing my head in... I've got two of them and I want to ditch one because I don't want to keep the e-mail address but I can't because all my music, apps etc. were purchased with it and there doesn't appear to be any way to transfer everything to my other Apple ID.

Although (newer) Apple IDs take the form of an email address they are not forever bound to that address.While you can't migrate purchases to a different Apple ID you can change the email address associated with your curent "iTunes store" Apple ID. Your login name (which takes the form of an email address) won't change, but you can direct all business to an email address you still control and let the original email address go. Less than optimum but workable.

Did you try inputting your iCloud credentials in or did you see MobileMe and just shit a brick?

No, I did NOT try to enter my Apple ID when the settings clearly tell me that a) I NEED a MobileMe account and b) please enter your MobileMe credentials. So again, why should I have tried entering my Apple ID credentials? Because "it just works" or what?! Tsss...

Anyway, I think the problem is rather my router which has all ports blocked and I need to check UPnP whether it is really activated (as explained in the link I posted shortly after my initial post). Maybe that convinces OS X 10.7.2 to startup the Back To My Mac service properly, instead of showing me a confusing "MobileMe account needed!" dialog...

I've ended up with a handful of AppleIDs and it's a real pain. I originally signed up from the UK, but now I live in France. My mobile provider has some apps (e.g. to manage sign-in on their public wifi network), but they are ONLY available in the French App Store, and I can't use my UK ID in there, so Apple forces me to have additional IDs. My apps are now split across the two accounts and both iTunes and the App Store app get very confused, not least because it's not possible to tell which store an app came from. The App Store app shows updates across all IDs at once (suggesting some kind of merging is already going on), but if you hit 'all updates' and the available updates includes updates from >1 store, it will fail, but not tell you which app caused it. When switching between accounts on iPhone, you have to re-enter the complete login details every time, which is completely unnecessary and a real pain. iTunes doesn't fare much better. Generally multiple account management is a complete mess, and Apple really needs to sort it out.

I remain a PC user for my business. Due to multiple apple id accounts I wound up with multiple calendars each with duplicate entries. Also took synchronization to mean that my contact info would remain on my PC hard drive and be duplicated on other devices. Contact info and tasks are gone from local in Outlook and can only be accessed via cloud. I don't mind cloud for duplicating info/backup but am not convinced it is superior as primary storage.

Most of These Problems are a result of people having been using Apple IDs incorrectly in the first place. "Sharing" an Apple ID isn't exactly in keeping with the rules. These transition problems are not Apple's fault. It's just come time that the rules can't be bent quite as far.

I've been working in Bangladesh the past month (normally in US). After the iCloud went up I was no longer able to access my MobileMe email account from my Mac. Interestingly enough, I can access it from my iPad 2 and my iPhone 3GS, but not from my Mac. Sadly, the Mac has the files I want to email around. This sucks. Not about to to switch to iCloud while I'm out of the country because (1) Can't update to iOS5 while I'm here (my sync machine is at home) and (2) if something goes wrong then I wouldn't even be able to get email on my phone or iPad.

If Jobs was upset with the Mobile Me launch, he's probably turning in his grave right now.

Well - the multiple Apple ID issues kind of explain that there's some complexity there though. I've also come from MobileMe and lost email on 2 occasions now. Which is bad. I had just resigned to switch my email from Gmail to Mac.com - after doing it the other way around for the past 7 years, even though I kept my .Mac account all this time - and now this.

Let's hope they get it together. I do believe that iCloud is magnitudes more ambitious than MobileMe so it's likely they will be able to get something as mundane as an email server working. I'd know I would expect that for a multi billion dollar data center...

"Note: Using Back to My Mac to connect to Airport Disks (USB drives connected to Apple's Wi-Fi base stations such as Airport Extreme and Time Capsule) is not possible with iCloud."

So it looks like a pretty useful feature of the Airport/Time Capsule has been removed :(

Thanks for that link, I had been looking around for a while trying to find any mention of the fate of this feature. It being removed was my main fear in this upgrade as I loved to be able to access the airport disk while I was at work through MobileMe/BTMM. I had my iTunes media folder on that drive and it worked seamlessly with iTunes on my laptop meaning that I could stream my entire iTunes library over the net whenever I had that drive plugged into the Airport Extreme.

It was a great feature. Having already upgraded to iCloud I can confirm that it definitely doesn't work anymore even though my MobileMe details are still entered into the router's settings. Let's hope it come back...

Did you try inputting your iCloud credentials in or did you see MobileMe and just shit a brick?

No, I did NOT try to enter my Apple ID when the settings clearly tell me that a) I NEED a MobileMe account and b) please enter your MobileMe credentials. So again, why should I have tried entering my Apple ID credentials? Because "it just works" or what?! Tsss...

Anyway, I think the problem is rather my router which has all ports blocked and I need to check UPnP whether it is really activated (as explained in the link I posted shortly after my initial post). Maybe that convinces OS X 10.7.2 to startup the Back To My Mac service properly, instead of showing me a confusing "MobileMe account needed!" dialog...

I now have to assume your trolling. If you weren't transitioning, it should have just worked with your iCloud account. Get over it.

My wife's office is stuck trying to figure-out a transition path. My wife ha s a company-provided iPhone, which she has synced to her personal Apple ID/iTunes account on our home Mac. However, her office calendars are synced with her boss' Mobile Me account. No one has been able to give her an answer as to whether she will still be able to sync her calendar with her boss' account, yet still use her personal AppleID via the home account.

"People who never used MobileMe and only ever used one Apple ID for iTunes purchases appear to be experiencing a completely smooth transition to iCloud."

Not true. My AppleID, which matches that simple scenario, was accepted on my iPhone and iPad, and two of my Macs, but on my MBA I'm told that "This AppleID is valid but is not an iCloud account" and am directed to a completely useless web page.

All in all, a pretty shabby showing by Apple at the start of their cloud adventure.

This is pitiful! Apple has known for many weeks about the potential problems associated with creating a second AppleID just for iCloud registration. Really too bad they weren't able to deal with this issue before opening up iCloud registration to the general public.

So okay, I updated (painlessly) to 10.7.2 on my MacBook Pro (my productive system iMac is still on Snow Leopard though), and without much expectations I opened the iCloud settings panel (or rather: it opened itself the first time I opened iTunes).

"So what is it good for?"

- Disk space

Agreed, 5 GB is more than what I get with Dropbox. But Dropbox is cross-platform and works well

- Sync of Address Book & Calendar

That's being done via Google

- Sync of Email

Huh? With POP3 that *might* make sense (to have the same folder structure sync'ed over devices), but with IMAP/Google Mail that's definitively not necessary to "sync emails". Or did I miss an "important feature" here?

- Sync of Photos and Music

That's something I especially do NOT want! I want to have control over which photos REMAIN on which device (iPhone, iPod Touch, iMac, MacBook Pro), and I want to sync them explicitly between two devices. Same goes for MP3s where I have dedicated "sync lists" per device (they have different capacities anyway, so I don't see why it would make sense to have "all data everywhere" - for instance I don't even have the same set of applications on my iPhone and iPod Touch!)

So no use to me.

- Find my Mac

Well, nice toy But not a killer feature for me. After all I NEVER lost a device as expensive such as a laptop (I admit I am not a guy travelling a lot with it), and if I did, it is either found and returned to "Lost & Found" and I get it back, or it is really stolen, in which case a message "Please bring back my laptop!" wouldn't help anyway! (And how would the "thief" receive this message anyway, my MacBook Pro is fully encrypted, so they would have to reformat it anyway and then bye bye "Find my Mac"...

- Back to my Mac

Now THAT would be a nice feature! But apparently you have to be a MobileMe member to use this service? Which means 99 bucks a year? For something I get for FREE with TeamViewer (again cross-platform)? No thanks!

Anything else I missed what iCloud can do for me on a *desktop* or *laptop* what I can't already do for cheap with other solutions (Google Mail/Calendar, Dropbox, Teamviewer)?

Cheers

This is an immensely silly post(a) The WHOLE POINT of iCloud is that it is open to developers. It is a set of APIs and services that allow ALL developers to synchronize data between ALL your Apple devices.

It is unfortunate that Apple have been more than a little ham-fisted in what they have done so far, from account transitioning to under-provisioned servers, to some severe limitations and stupidities in the initial round of APIs; and I'm not going to justify any of that --- when introducing an unusual new product, you have a responsibility to get the details right on day one, and whoever is running iCloud deserves to be sent to manage the new Apple store opening soon in Turkmenistan. But it is important not to let these first round stupidities blind you to the grand vision. Apple thinks it is stupid to have to compromise on a SINGLE computing device --- do you choose a phone that is portable, or an iMac that allows you to be really productive? Much more sensible is to own as many as makes sense of the various "human-body-sized" form factors --- a phone, an iPad, a laptop and a desktop. iCloud is an attempt to make owning multiple devices a pleasure, where you can always get at your data from any device, rather than a hassle where you are constantly angry that what you need is on one of your other devices.

(b) Even IF iCloud were only a clone of Dropbox and Google Calendar and so on, it would STILL make sense for Apple to develop it. Apple ---like any large company --- cannot afford to have essential facilities at the mercy of other companies. There's just too much risk that things might go wrong, and you have to rely on another company when you plan a major new strategic direction.You will notice that Apple developed Pages, Numbers, Keynote --- they didn't just say "well MS is doing a good job with Office". And for a while Pages, Numbers, Keynote might have seemed redundant. But notice that THEY run on iOS, and MS Office does not. One could make exactly the same argument regarding Safari --- at the time IE for Mac still existed, and Firefox was an alternative --- but again look at the big picture. Same thing for video editing software.

No one has been able to give her an answer as to whether she will still be able to sync her calendar with her boss' account, yet still use her personal AppleID via the home account.

She can use separate Apple IDs for store purchases and contact/calendar sync.

Howeve, the proper way for her to access her work calendar would be for her boss to share that calendar (or calendars) with her "iCloud" account. That way she logs into her own account and has access to both the shared work calendars and her private calendar(s).

Not to discount the problems others are having but the transition of my MobileMe account to iCloud went reasonably smoothly (discounting a brief email password outage on Friday.) The only real hitch that I had to manually remove my mobile.me calendar account from the calendar app--both mobile.me and iCloud calendars were present which gave the appearance of duplicate entries. Killed the "old" calendar account and all was well. I have a separate Apple ID used for store purchases.

I feel for those suffering and I trust most of these teething pains will be solved in due course.

Anything else I missed what iCloud can do for me on a *desktop* or *laptop* what I can't already do for cheap with other solutions (Google Mail/Calendar, Dropbox, Teamviewer)?

Back to My MaciTunes Match (no uploading required)The fact that your data isn't being used to sell you things.

But honestly, nobody is telling you that you have to use iCloud. If you don't see the value, then don't use it. It's that simple. As for me, if I am to trust a third party company with my data, it's going to be one where they make their profits from selling me products they make, rather than one where I (more specifically, my data) am the product being sold to advertisers.

The Apple ID problem is doing my head in... I've got two of them and I want to ditch one because I don't want to keep the e-mail address but I can't because all my music, apps etc. were purchased with it and there doesn't appear to be any way to transfer everything to my other Apple ID.

Until Apple comes up with a way to merge accounts, just set the old one's email to forward, and stop using it to buy new apps, songs, etc.